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Monica Locke
Professor Ben
13 October 2015
CAS 137H
How About a Cup of Coffee?
What is the most addicting drug in the world? Caffeine. Coffee has become an
object of daily use for most modern Americans. Starbucks used the idea of getting coffee
to promote getting together in its 2014 campaign called Meet Me at Starbucks. A
commercial released by Folgers coffee in 2010 did the same thing, just four years earlier
and with different tools of rhetoric. Both of these commercials were trying to make a
connection with the worlds favorite morning drink and the basis of our being, that is, the
desire for relationships and family. Connecting with others and forming bonds together is
built on emotions and experiences. Starbucks and Folgers tried to channel those two
things over their coffee products. When dealing with the promotion of an object, one of
the main devices to make an impact on an audience is emotion. The Meet Me at
Starbucks campaign and the Folgers Brother and Sister commercial use similar
rhetorical devices to create an emotional appeal from an audience to promote the idea of
getting together over a cup of coffee.
The Folgers Brother and Sister commercial is about a young man coming home
from a volunteer effort to his awaiting sister. He comes in and pours himself a nice hefty
cup of Folgers coffee, and gives his sister a Christmas present. She takes the bow off of
the present and puts it on her brothers shoulder stating that he was her present. This

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commercial is loaded with emotional appeals. It pulls on a persons sense of family and
tradition. The brother being a volunteer make an audience member more empathetic to
his journey throughout the commercial. The sister waiting up provide a sense of
nostalgia, especially because it is Christmas time, and kids cannot sleep because Santa is
coming. When the brother pulls out the present, once again, a connection to the tradition
of Christmas is made. This sense of tradition and family is important to society and
Folgers used those two things to leave a greater impact with their call to center your
engagements around a cup of coffee. The commercials sense of pathos reaches the
extreme at the very end. When the sister calls her brother her present, the sense of the
family bond is strengthened. The box is not even opened. In that moment, it is solely
about a brother and sister, back together, drinking coffee.
The Meet Me at Starbucks campaign took a different approach to the idea of
relationships. Instead of a single relationship based on family, their commercial
showcases many different types of interactions.There are many people seen throughout
the commercial. People are interacting with one another, but we do not know the
specifics of the situation. Words are shown with each sequence of people. Particularly the
relationships that stand out the most are the ones that are featured in longer clips. The two
longest clips of couples are of a young couple, and an old one. The young couples tag line
on the screen is new love. Immediately after, an older couple is shown with their own
tag line of enduring love. Individualss have a biological desire to have an emotional
bond with someone else. Starbucks is playing on that desire. There is the an ideology in
society that consists of romance. A commonplace that falls into that is the idea of falling

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in love in a coffee shop. Starbucks shows the beginning of that desire and the couple that
made that ideology true.
Starbucks was able to create a larger audience with its many uses of relationships,
but Folgers was able to hit a specific audience with more pathos. Its use of background to
the characters and story, a brother coming home on Christmas, allowed the audience to
create a deeper emotional connection with the pair shown. This connection creates a
desire to have coffee in your home with someone and enjoy time together rather than
Starbucks idea of grabbing someone and going out to get coffee. People look for
homeliness and deep connections with others. Folgers promotion of connections within
the home is what made their commercial more powerful when concerning pathos.
Kairos also played a major role in the understanding and impact left on an
audience. The Folgers commercial was released around Christmas. Christmas is a time of
coming together with family and friends and enjoying time spent with each other. Folgers
used this idea to create a huge impact on their audience. By having the young man reunite
with his family at this time, Folgers allows for the audience to connect this story with
some of their own. By releasing this around Christmas, the mood is already at a shift
from the normal day to day emotions. This commercial uses that shift and conveys their
message with much more pathos. The presents are also used to help identify the kairos
and amplify it. Gifts are exchanged at Christmas time among family and friends. The
Brother and Sister commercial made the presence of each other the presents. All of this
still centered around the two sharing a cup of coffee. This is persuasive to the audience. It

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appeals to their sense of family and unity. All of this heightened once again by the kairos
of the release date.
Starbucks Meet me at Starbucks campaign was slightly different. They did not
try to be persuasive in a specific time of the year but rather the specific time of the world.
Cultures of the world around us is becoming more appreciated during this time period.
Starbucks used that to promote its idea of getting together. Their clip is full of people
from many different countries. The emotion brought out in this is different than Folgers.
It is felt more as unifying and broadening. It draws you into the story as a whole, not just
one specific. With the new sense of globalization emerging in the world, Starbucks was
able to draw emotion from that specific kairos and promote its idea of civic engagement.
Although successful in some areas, the two commercials also dealt with some
difficulty regarding pathos. The Folgers commercial was said by the audience to have
come across as awkward, and sometimes even uncomfortable. The emotion it was trying
to evoke by its characters was said to at some points be incestuous. According to an
article by Vanity Fair with an interview with the brother himself, what came from the
commercial is An impressive following of fans and fan-fiction writers insistent on
shipping the most forbidden kind of sibling love, long after the commercial stopped
airing on TV (Park). It tried to play on pathos too much with its brother and sister
relationship. Where Folgers went overboard, Starbucks went under. The Meet Me at
Starbucks commercial was lacking in depth. It gave short glimpses of relationships
which did not allow the audience to be drawn in completely. They were forced to try and
draw their own parallels to the story resulting in a disconnect from the pathos trying to be

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evoked. The commercial tried to hit a range of emotions, rather than focusing on a few
and channeling a deeper audience connection. Therefore, both of these commercials had
some instances where their rhetoric fell flat.
Starbucks and Folgers both attempted to be persuasive with an audience by using
the rhetorical device of pathos to promote their idea of getting together with coffee. They
used the idea of family and relationships to evoke the human desire for love and
happiness. With the use of kairos and previous ideologies and commonplaces, the two
commercials were able to do that. The commercials had several shortcomings, but they
were still able to manage to create a connection with the audience through the same use
of media and with the same artifact. Coffee, a drink had worldwide, has been emotionally
connected to the world and the people around us. These two commercials played on that
and did in fact, play with our heartstrings. A cup of coffee is best served with others
around you.

word count: 1354

Works Cited
Park, Benjamin. The Folgers Brother-Sister Christmas Commercial, Explained by the
Brother Himself. Vanity Fair. Cond Nast, 23 Dec. 2015. Web. 30 April
2016.

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